How Operations Leaders at a 50-Practice DSO Use Data to Fix Revenue Leaks at Dental Practices Faster

Running one dental practice is difficult. Running dozens creates an entirely different operational challenge.

Leadership cannot be physically present in every location, speak with every team each day, or rely on occasional reports to understand what is happening across the organization.

As a DSO grows, the problem increasingly becomes one of attention: out of dozens of practices, which locations need leadership's focus right now, and what specifically needs to improve?

That is one of the primary ways Shared Practices Group is using Root Data today.

Nicole Gurule, National Director of Operations at Shared Practices Group, uses Root Data to monitor performance across the organization, identify underperforming practices, and investigate what may be driving the problem. The objective is not to give operators more reports to review. It is to help them understand where attention is needed and make better operational decisions faster.

Replacing “Vibe” With Objective Performance

One of the challenges of managing a large dental organization is that subjective assessments of a practice do not always match its actual performance.

A regional manager may believe a location is doing well because the team is engaged, the schedule looks busy, or the office generally feels healthy. Those observations can still be valuable, but they do not always tell the full story.

Gurule described the problem as managing based on a center's “vibe.” The numbers can sometimes reveal something very different.

Instead of relying primarily on impressions, SPG's operations team can look across a consistent set of performance metrics to see which practices are falling outside expected ranges.

Collections per new patient, adjusted production per new patient, collections relative to goals, show rates, and other operational measures provide an objective starting point for the conversation.

This changes the question from, “Do we think this practice is doing well?” to, “What does the performance actually tell us?”

That distinction becomes increasingly important as an organization grows. Leadership needs a common language for performance so that regional managers and executives can discuss the same reality rather than working from different interpretations of how a practice is doing.

Starting With the Practices That Need the Most Attention

Every Friday, Gurule and other members of Shared Practices Group's operational leadership spend several hours reviewing practice performance with regional managers.

Rather than trying to analyze every location with the same level of intensity, the team focuses on the practices that are underperforming. Regional managers rotate through sessions where leadership reviews several of their lowest-performing centers, discusses what appears to be causing the problem, and develops an action plan.

Root Data provides much of the operating picture behind those discussions.

For Gurule, Collections Per New Patient is one of the primary metrics used to evaluate how efficiently a center is turning patient opportunities into revenue. If that number falls below an expected range, the metric acts as a signal that something deeper may be happening inside the practice.

The important point is that the metric does not provide the answer. It tells the operations team where to begin looking.

That is a fundamentally different way to think about dental analytics. The purpose of the data is not simply to report performance after the fact. It is to direct leadership attention toward the parts of the organization most likely to require intervention.

Moving From a Red Flag to the Root Cause

Once an underperforming practice has been identified, the next question is why.

Suppose collections per new patient are below expectations. That tells leadership that the practice is generating less revenue from its patient opportunities than it should, but there are several possible causes.

Gurule may then look at True Close Rate to understand how effectively consultations are converting into patients who begin treatment. From there, she can break the number down further by looking at same-day starts and callback starts.

If same-day starts are weak, there may be an issue with how treatment is being presented during the consultation. If callback starts are weak, the problem may instead be the team's follow-up process after the patient leaves.

Average Revenue Per Start adds another layer of context. A practice could technically be closing patients at an acceptable rate while primarily converting lower-value treatment rather than larger cases. In that situation, the headline conversion number might look healthy while the underlying revenue performance remains weak.

The investigation can eventually move from the numbers to the behavior behind them. Leadership may review consultation recordings, examine how pricing conversations are being handled, or coach team members on specific parts of the sales process.

The workflow is straightforward: identify the underperforming practice, identify the metric creating concern, investigate the related metrics, isolate the likely operational cause, and intervene.

That is the real use case. The dashboard is simply the interface that makes the operating problem visible.

Why This Matters More as a DSO Scales

As a dental organization grows, leadership attention becomes one of its scarcest resources.

Every practice can probably improve somewhere, but treating every issue as equally important creates its own form of operational noise. The more useful question is where leadership intervention can have the greatest impact right now.

Without reliable, accessible performance data, operators can spend significant time trying to establish what is happening before they can begin solving the problem. When everyone is working from a consistent view of the business, the conversation can start further downstream.

Instead of spending the meeting debating whether a center is performing well, the team can spend the meeting determining why it is underperforming and what needs to happen next.

That also creates stronger accountability. If the underlying metrics show that a center is materially below its expected performance, a subjective assessment that things “feel fine” is no longer enough. Regional managers and leadership have a shared set of numbers against which progress can be evaluated.

The data does not replace the operator. It gives the operator a better starting point.

Faster Data Creates a Faster Management Loop

Speed is another important part of the operating model.

Gurule values being able to see business performance during the day rather than consistently waiting until the following day for updated information. That difference may sound small, but it matters when teams are managing daily production and collection goals across dozens of locations.

More immediate visibility allows an operator to identify a developing issue while there is still time to respond. The value is not simply having a dashboard that refreshes more frequently. The real value is shortening the time between something happening inside the practice and leadership being able to act on it.

That creates a tighter management loop: performance becomes visible, leadership identifies the issue, the team intervenes, and the resulting performance can then be measured.

The shorter that loop becomes, the faster an organization can learn and correct course.

Dental Analytics Should Help Operators Decide What to Do Next Dental practices and DSOs do not suffer from a lack of data. Their practice management systems, marketing platforms, phone systems, financial tools, and analytics software already generate enormous amounts of information.

The harder problem is deciding what deserves attention.

Traditional dental analytics tools are often built around the assumption that displaying more metrics and reports will eventually lead to better decisions. For an experienced operator, those reports can certainly be useful, but someone still has to interpret the information, determine what matters, connect related metrics, and decide what action should follow.

That burden becomes harder to manage as the number of locations increases.

The more useful model is software that helps operations leaders move from data to a decision. Which practice needs attention? What changed? Which metric is driving the problem? What should the team investigate next? Did the intervention actually improve performance?

That is the direction we are building toward with Root Data.

Instead of simply becoming another destination for viewing dental practice data, Root Data is designed to sit above the systems practices already use, and help operators understand what the data means.

The goal is not more dashboards. It is a faster path from signal to action.

For an individual practice owner, that creates clarity. For the operations team managing a 50-practice DSO, it creates leverage.

If you have any questions, or would like to get to the Root of your revenue leaks, email us at hello@rootdata.ai